Six Degrees
Can who your employees know make a difference in your sales?
Entrepreneurs know the importance of networking. Sometimes it is
all about who you know. And now, with some new software technology
that's on the market, it's all about who you and your
employees know. You can call it relationship mining, but
relationship capital management is more accurate. Three leading
companies in this area are start-ups Spoke Software Inc. (www.spoke.com), Visible
Path Corp. (www.visiblepath.com) and ZeroDegrees Inc. (www.zerodegrees.com).
Essentially, the software maps out networks of who everyone in
your organization knows, partly by hooking up with a CRM company
like SalesForce.com Inc. Antony Brydon, president and co-founder of
Visible Path, says, "We're helping people capitalize on
their relationships on an individual level and on a corporate
level." The intent is to arm your salespeople with quality
personal introductions to potential customers, generate sales leads
and accelerate the sales process.
The snake in the grass is the privacy issue. Few people are
willing to open their contact lists to all comers. Visible Path
deals with this by keeping participants' identity and
information confidential until, or if, they decide to share it on a
case-by-case basis. Bonus incentives are built in for those who
decide to join. Strength indicators show how strong relationships
between two people are in order to point users toward the
highest-quality introductions. Not every growing business will want
to invest in this software, but if you're aggressively seeking
new sales leads, it could be for you. Before implementing it,
however, be sure to address privacy issues with your employees.
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The concepts may be old, but the social network algorithms that
mine through centrally located contact data and power this kind of
relationship management software are fairly new. Brydon sees a
future where the software is used everywhere from HR to building
partnerships.